Books reviewed: Solzhenitsyn as he saw himself
Stephen Kotkin reviews five books by and about the life, exile and writing of the Russian author
The force, labelled Whites, would go down in defeat, its survivors compelled to disperse into emigration. But Solzhenitsyn – even though he, too, would be forced from his homeland – subsequently won the White movement’s fight with his pen. His novels One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, In the First Circle and Cancer Ward, as well as his nonpareil three-volume literary investigation The Gulag Archipelago, persuasively blackened the Soviet regime at its roots.
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One hundred years ago
this month, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk (“acidic waters”), a
curative town in the North Caucasian foothills of Russia, which was then
wracked by civil war. Earlier that year, 300 miles north at Novocherkassk, the
capital of the Don Cossacks, former tsarist officers had proclaimed the
formation of a Volunteer Army to reverse the Bolshevik coup of 1917.
The force, labelled Whites, would go down in defeat, its survivors compelled to disperse into emigration. But Solzhenitsyn – even though he, too, would be forced from his homeland – subsequently won the White movement’s fight with his pen. His novels One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, In the First Circle and Cancer Ward, as well as his nonpareil three-volume literary investigation The Gulag Archipelago, persuasively blackened the Soviet regime at its roots.
According to an estimate by Publishers
Weekly, by 1976 Solzhenitsyn had sold 30 million copies of his books in
some thirty languages, with sales of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago
accounting for up to a third of that total. Long after
Soviet communism came crashing down in 1991, his evocative works based on a
multitude of first-hand experiences of the forced labour camp system retain
their potency and urgency. If, as the scholar John B. Dunlop has written, “it
is as an artist that Solzhenitsyn will be remembered or forgotten”, then he is
destined to endure.
Having earned global
acclaim – including the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1970, awarded “for the ethical force with which he has pursued
the indispensable traditions of Russian literature” – Solzhenitsyn dedicated
himself to a literary cycle, The Red Wheel, on Russia’s Revolution.
Published in Russian between 1971 and 1991, the series derives its name from a
detached carriage wheel that revolves in flames in August 1914, the
first of four “nodes” through which the author organized these novels of real
and invented personages. That initial instalment appeared in English translation
in 1972; November 1916, originally in two volumes, followed in
1985, along with a reworked two-volume version of its predecessor. March
1917, in four books, is only now beginning to appear in English, courtesy
of University of Notre Dame Press. (April 1917, in two books).
In the first volume of March 1917, well translated by Marian
Schwartz, many haunting passages can be found, such as Nicholas II’s
confrontation with the icon of Christ following his tormented abdication.
Still, the overall four-node roman-fleuve runs to nearly 6,000
pages, in ten volumes, deluging readers... read more:
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/solzhenitsyn-as-he-saw-himself/see also
Alexievich’s voices are those of the people no one cares about, but the ones whose lives constitute the vast majority of what history actually is.
